Marbles: Third Dingle

I'm still on vacation. While I'm gone, you can read excerpts from a book I wrote four years ago, Miss Delivery: A Postal-Mortem. This is the third part of a series that begins here and continues here.


I was a half-hour earlier getting to Mrs. Jackov’s house, but apparently had still not achieved the magic delivery time. The door swung open, and I ducked my head reflexively. My work ethic, personal habits and parentage were all brought up one at a time and speculated on. I had had time to think about it, and managed to insert a proposition when she drew breath for another tirade. “I could just ring your bell when I get here, and then you could hand me your outgoing mail,” I offered, just before the door slammed shut.

Back at the station, I made a general inquiry. Did anyone know what time Mrs. Jackov expected her mail to be delivered? As it turns out, everyone knew. And not just the carriers, either. Also the supervisors, and the clerks, and the janitorial staff—anyone who had ever been in a position to answer the phone. A gruff, unsmiling carrier turned towards me and spoke with the voice of a cattle rustler. “Dead last, kid,” he growled, stubbing out his cigarette for emphasis. “She gets it dead last.” I was awestruck. Maybe some day I would have the self-possession to carry off an attitude like that. That little reverie was quickly extinguished with the memory of my waitress stint.

Wally Collins was gone all week, failing even to call in a few of those days, which made him officially AWOL. He was rechristened, in his absence, “Awolly.” You never want to give postal employees a chance to yoke you with a good nickname. You’ll die with it. Just ask Crud-lips and Dribbles.

But by the end of the week, I had really picked up the pace, both sorting and delivering mail. One day, the mail volume was so light that I actually got out earlier than Awolly would have, and I blazed through the route just to see how well I could do.

It was very well indeed. Marbles, sound asleep by the wall, was nonplussed, but he elected to postpone his nap and provided the usual escort service. I had developed a bit of a strut by the time I waltzed up to Mrs. Jackov’s house. There were no letters hanging out of her mail slot. I stuffed her mail inside and turned smartly to go, getting as far as the first bed of tulips (planted in rows, rigid as soldiers) before the door snapped open. “Hey!” came the familiar snarl. “You’re early!” I smiled and took a little bow. Possibly, this was inappropriate.

“I don’t have my bills ready! How am I supposed to get anything done when other people can’t even keep to a damn schedule?” A host of retorts rose up within me along with some quite specific fantasies involving ice picks. What actually came out was a mild-mannered offer to come back and pick up her mail in a half-hour. It was not the loudest of the voices within me. How had it achieved dominance? It had been around the longest; it belonged to the well-brought-up little girl who said Yes Ma’am and No Sir and strove to reduce friction. Only the fabled ice pick had been around longer, but no one has actually clapped eyes on one since Trotsky.

The rest of the day I replayed the encounter, replacing my part of the dialogue with ever more vivid recreations. By the time I’d gotten back to the station my embellishments had sharpened right up and become audible. Even the notable fact that I had completed an entire route in eight hours did not soothe me.

The next day, I was still engaged in perfecting my rant and was still lobbing some choice syllables into the air when Marbles offered to give me a listen. Marbles was sympathetic but was of the opinion that I should just do the best job I could and then sit in the sun, maybe drool a little. And it was Marbles who further suggested that maybe my job was a little more important than I had thought. For one thing, he transmitted, scratching his left ear with his hind leg, it was clear that Mrs. Jackov was determined to be angry no matter what I did. And if that was the case, why, it was important that I be there every day to bleed the pressure valve, or there could be dire consequences for the neighborhood and possibly (here Marbles briefly consulted an itchy spot on his tail) the whole world. This could indeed be one of the great contributions of the letter carrier breed. There were probably Jackovs in every place and time, and the everyday disappointment that the letter carrier brings is the only thing taking pressure off the system before they all explode. Without people like me, Marbles concluded, shards of malevolence from the Jackovs of the world would rain down upon the planet and doom us all.

Marbles sensed that he might be needed a while longer and accompanied me for the rest of the afternoon. When we turned the corner towards Mrs. Jackov’s house, we saw her open her door, check her watch, and place a letter in the mail slot for pickup. We arrived within the minute. The door flew open. Mrs. Jackov stared at me, face crimson, as I wished her a good day. I had turned to go before she found her voice. “I don’t know who keeps letting that damn dog out, but he’d better stay the hell out of the tulips,” she yelled.

Marbles and I moved on, companionably. He wasn’t so bad. He was a pretty good dog. It was a pretty good life. We both had a job, we had our independence, and I don’t know what-all else.

Marbles: Second Dingle

I'm on vacation. While I'm gone, I've put in some excerpts from a book of postal stories I wrote four years ago, just for fun. The story of Marbles begins here.

Whether or not a route had direction cards was a matter of the route’s regular carrier. They could be useful, confusing, illegible, or non-existent, depending on the carrier’s artistic sensibilities, clarity, or tendency to care. This batch was one of the good ones. My progress delivering the route was slow, but it never stopped altogether, and whenever I hesitated, a direction card would appear with arrows and boxes representing houses and all would become clear. At one point I had come up to a dead-end, having delivered all the houses in sight, but still hadn’t run out of letters, so I glanced down at the explanatory card.

CROSS STREET HEAD UP HILL RIGHT AT STONE WALL FOLLOW MARBLES

Across the street was a grassy hill with a worn path, and I went that direction until a short stone wall came into view, and then I hesitated. There was a large, peculiar-looking yellow dog sitting by the wall, regarding me with his tongue lolling. “Marbles?” I said, and whap whap whap went the yellow dog’s tail. He took off at a human pace through the woods, beside a hedge, and over an embankment, culminating in a driveway to a house. He trotted up to the mailbox and sat down solidly in self-satisfaction. The house numbers matched the address on my next letter. This might have been the finest dog I had ever met, and I told him so, whacking him affectionately on his side. He stood up once again, to make himself easier to praise, and that’s when I took a good look at him.

There was something hanging off the dog, something underneath, something I fervently hoped was a temporary accoutrement, a little something picked up in a romp through the woods, but no. I took in just as much of the dog as I wanted to and then directed my attention elsewhere. The dog did not so much defy description as defy observation. I didn’t want to look. Marbles turned around and headed amiably off, trot-bobble, trot-bobble, to a place in the sun, and plonked down in a contented heap. He had a job, he had his independence, and I swear I don’t know what-all else he had.

The rest of my section looked pretty straightforward and I went on my way, pleased and a little unnerved by my introduction to Marbles. The direction cards were invaluable and the rest of the route went slowly but uneventfully, until I got to a Mrs. Jackov’s house. I was just dropping mail through her slot when the door flew open. Mrs. Jackov glared at me like the living bane of Oz. “You’re late,” she hissed, unnecessarily. I began to apologize in a general sort of way, without the desired effect. In fact, she had a couple letters to go in her hand and she began to swat me on the head with them. “I can’t just leave my letters hanging out of the slot all [swat] day [swat] long [swat], waiting for you, they’ll get wet! Or stolen!” I promised, based on a habitual and unfounded optimism, to do better the next day.

Wally Collins called in sick the next day too, so I did have a chance to redeem myself with Mrs. Jackov. Things went a little smoother, and Marbles was once again at his post next to the little stone wall. We greeted each other like old friends, and I patted him carefully on top of his head. Once again he led the way, trot-bobble, trot-bobble, and when we emerged at the driveway, we startled the meter reader. “Is that your dog?” he asked, and I explained the dog and his evident function in life. “This here is Marbles,” I said, introducing the two. “Marbles, Meter Reader.” Marbles put out a nose, accepted a pat, and began to trot away.

“There’s something hanging off that dog,” the meter reader said. “Looks that way," I said, looking a different way. He observed the dog for a scant moment and then abruptly launched into a torrent of idle chatter. The meter reader and I developed an equally fervent and precipitous interest in anything not related to the dog. We were still gabbling away when a Sears delivery truck pulled up. The driver got out, with a friendly wave in our direction, and went towards the back of his truck. Marbles got up to investigate the new possibility for attention, and the driver provided some, pronouncing him a good boy. Re-validated, Marbles trotted back to his sun spot. The Sears man stared after him.

“What is that hanging off that dog?” he wanted to know.

“We don’t know," the meter reader and I said in unison, and steered the conversation hard in another direction. Meanwhile, the other fellow failed to pick up on our diversion tactics and continued to stare at the dog. “Holy cow,” he said, crouching down.

To be continued.

Marbles: First Dingle

I'm on vacation. But I've loaded up Murrmurrs with something a little different. When I retired from carrying mail in 2008, the first thing I did was write a book of dang-near true postal stories. I called it Miss Delivery: A Postal-Mortem. Here are some excerpts: "Marbles," in three parts, begins on my second day delivering a route all by myself. The first day had not gone well.

It’s hard for me to feel bad for long. I rebound fast. This is not a sign of intelligence. In fact, it is often achieved by willfully ignoring or denying all that is true. If I were the last tyrannosaur holed out in a cave when the asteroid hit, I’d come out and think: hmm. Chilly. Dark. But look! Toasted stegosaurus nuggets, as far as the eye can see.

So the day after my hellish solo debut, after a dreamless sleep, I went off to work in a much lighter frame of mind. After all, there was no possibility this was going to be as bad a day as yesterday. For one thing, I had gained some familiarity with the sorting case. I would be able to make some headway sorting the mail this time. And I’d been out on parts of the route, at least, and wasn’t likely to forget where the mailboxes I’d already found were. Certainly not that cutesy little birdhouse piece of crap with the hungry cat face on it holding the little tiny US MAIL sign in its mouth swinging from the tree halfway across the yard in Gnomesville that you could only see by climbing the steps to the front door and leaning out over the porch. Yes, things were certainly looking up. I walked into the station, punched in my shiny new time card and strode over to the sorting case. The boss met me there. “Collins called in sick,” he informed me. “I’m going to need you over on route 136.” And just like that, there I was, right back to looking like an exhibit in the Postal Wax Museum.

It occurred to me that it was inevitable that, in one’s first days on any job, things might go a little sideways. It takes a while for the smoothness to set in. You can’t expect yourself to be able to accomplish the same things as a seasoned professional, and no one else would expect you to, either. Would they? I picked up a letter and scanned the new case, hardening into a familiar pose. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

As I stood, poised with my original letter outstretched towards the case, I thought about some of my previous jobs. I had been a waitress at Friendly’s Ice Cream. On my first day, I admired the other waitresses who flew around the corners with dishes stacked all the way up either arm, swinging them down gracefully and setting them before their customers, and I thought: amazing. Soon, I’ll be able to do that. But I wasn’t. I was quite possibly the worst waitress ever. Months into the job, I still couldn't bring two lunches at a time to a table and park them correctly in front of the people who ordered them. In fact, I had so little talent that when I did manage to bring someone his correct order, and then served his coffee upside-down in his crotch, he went out of his way to reassure me. “Don’t worry,” he said earnestly. “It wasn’t warm, anyway.” He felt so sorry for me that he gave me an extra-large tip. Although maybe that was for dabbing him dry.

I wasn’t all that great shakes as a lab technician, either. I never could bring myself to kill a rat, and I used to wash all my colleague’s test tubes for him in exchange for dispatching my rodents: a half-hour’s work for me vs. fifteen seconds for him, and I considered it a great deal. I stood there with the same letter in my hand and it dawned on me that nothing in my personal occupational history could rule out that I would suck at this, too.

On this day, though, I got some assistance from another rookie carrier, one with a few months’ experience and a proper sympathy, and we were able to plug all the mail in the case and get the route ready to go in a reasonable amount of time. I had learned to place the Bad Dog cards in front of the letters for a bad-dog house, so that was an improvement right there, and my new friend also introduced me to the concept of Direction Cards, which were made up to guide the carrier through the odder deliveries—“back door,” “slot in garage,” or “blue house behind laurel hedge”, for instance. The other rookie didn’t seem to think I was irredeemable, and that plus the direction cards had given me a little heartbeam of hope.

To be continued.

The Old Crack-In-The-Face and Bust-In-The-Mouth

December

You don’t really notice gravity all that much until something goes just a little sideways and it takes you right down, like it did me the other night. Could have been worse. I didn’t go straight to the center of the earth, because the sidewalk stopped my face. The scariest part for my friend Margo, who, being the one who was right beside me, is pretty much on the hook for not grabbing me out of mid-air, was the sound: a mighty crack, like God snapping his fingers. Margo, being a recovering Catholic, is trained to react to God snapping his fingers, and she began to freak out right away. “Stay right there,” she yelled, “right there in that 34-degree puddle on the pavement, in the wind and rain. Don’t get up.” I started thinking.

What was that mighty crack? Oh. Face hitting pavement.

Man, that was fast. That didn’t take any time at all. Of course it doesn’t take any time, you idiot. You’re, like, three feet tall. And isn’t that exactly what old ladies say when they fall down? Yes it is. “Oh, my word, dearie, it all just happened so fast! I didn’t have time to think. And now my hip is broken, and soon I will die.” 

What the hell happened to my airbags? Didn’t I used to have airbags? Shit. I should have had them recharged after they deflated a few years ago.

I think I hit my cheekbone. Cheekbone! I have cheekbones! Awesome.

Well, I’d better get up, because we’re late for our dinner reservation, and it’s a serious dinner reservation. Margo was spinning in place making noises about throwing a coat over me and fetching Dave, and I had to head her off. “You’d better not get Dave,” I told her. “You’ll be in deep shit. Because he put me in your custody, and he totally would have caught me.” He might have. His reflexes are miraculous. He’s faster’n the smacky-sound on a spank.

November

Margo and I were trying out a restaurant that was hard to get into. Especially her, because she’s tall. The restaurant is in a converted broom closet. They’ve got room for five tables, with butter pats for spacers.  The sixth table was lubed up and jammed in hard by the toilet in the rear. The kitchen is in the front. You walk right through it, burners on the right, prep area on the left, with about a foot to spare, when you walk in. The wait staff has to wear satin pants to cut down on the friction. They’ll try for two seatings a night, and they don’t have room for error. So if you do score a reservation, they want your credit card up front and an option on one of your kidneys. If you don’t give them 24 hours notice for a cancellation, the chef is going to Mexico on your dime.

I explained all this to Margo, who was not letting me up off the sidewalk. “I’m fine,” I said. “We need to go eat before I lose a kidney. Come on. Do I sound at all loopy?” Well, that’s not really a fair question. Margo did a quick comparison to how I usually sound, and decided I might be as good as I get.

America's Fun Couple

We walked into the restaurant and I pointed at my face and said I'd just hit the sidewalk with it, and could I use the bathroom? They were nice as pie. They funneled me to the back, and gave me swabbing alcohol, a washcloth, and Neosporin. Once I was cleaned up and down to a steady ooze, they parked us at table six, next to the toilet, away from everyone else, and gave me a napkin filled with ice. I pressed it to one corner of my mouth and slid my dinner into the other corner.  Bleu Cheese Pear Hazelnut Blood Salad, Risotto Parmesan Nettles With Blood, and Plasma Panna Cotta. It was very good; maybe a little over-reliant on the one ingredient. By the end of the meal, my napkin looked like laundry day used to look like for me once a month. When the check came, a very, very, very long set of tongs emerged from somewhere behind us and snatched the napkin away.

The next morning, my knee was exploring new directions in life, and my upper lip was sprawling over my lower lip like a stranded oyster. No matter how you cut it, it has to be noted that this has not been a good winter for my face. First I poisoned it until it started sliding off my head like magma, and now this. But my face is not my fortune. If I actually did fall on my fortune, it would have hurt a lot worse, because it’s thin. Most of it is in a collection of fine salamander art that has not appreciated in the marketplace as anticipated. But still. I don’t ask much of my face. It’s there mainly to give folks an idea if I’m coming or going, and to keep the head goo inside. Either way, it’s falling down on the job.

Save The Children: 2013

Newtown CT is the epicenter of a radiating pain. All across the nation people are clutching their children or their guns to themselves, depending on which they fear for most.

I’m ambivalent about the Second Amendment, but I do know that a nation awash in junk food is going to fatten up, and a nation swimming in guns is going to suffer some casualties. I have many friends who are fond of their guns and have become persuaded that they are on the verge of having to hand them over, usually to some malevolent force called “the government.” The government, in this land, of course, is us, and sure enough, although few politicians will tilt against the NRA, there are a whole lot of plain citizens who would like to thin out the arms inventory. So I guess we are the malevolent force. I rarely chime in on this issue. I don’t warm up to guns, but I am willing to accept that other good people feel strongly that they should have some.

It’s the infamous “slippery slope” arguments that irk me: the notion that gay weddings will eventually cause people to bang their own dogs; the idea that giving people some control over their own deaths will lead to the establishment of gas chambers for grandma. There’s precious little possibility that Americans are ever going to be stripped of the arms they need or want, but that’s the bottom of the slippery slope the NRA has sold its adherents on, certain that we will be helpless to halt our skid. The slope goes both ways, of course. If we the people decide it’s okay to arm ourselves with assault rifles, why not multiple-grenade launchers? Why not nukes? Where do we draw the line? Can we talk about it without being hysterical?

There’s never a good massacre, but the ones that claim our children hurt us the worst. Once we’ve gotten a little age on us, we’re barnacled up with everything from annoying quirks to outright evil, or mental illness, which sometimes looks the same. So we care the most for our children. We presume them innocent. That’s an arbitrary distinction we make on the spectrum of life, a spectrum that some believe even includes the aspiring souls of sperms, but most of us make it. And we might just as well. We’re liable to make better decisions if we make them on behalf of the children. Especially if we include everyone’s children. There are families in Africa and Syria and Iraq that are suffering the same pain and terror as the families in Connecticut, but magnified, and endlessly. Bombs fall from the sky and the streets are flooded with personal weapons of mass destruction. We know because we provided them, for a price, and the only voices in our heads were those of the arms merchants and the fear merchants and the oil profiteers, operating under cover of our apathy.

So what do we do for our children? Do we start to stem the saturation of arms? Do we devote more resources to mental health? Do we finally get up the gumption to say hell no to the depleters of the earth who are so willing to trade our very survival for money? If we think only of what’s good for our kids, we’ll be on the right track.

Save The Children: 2012

New Business: I have a special page for my new book, Trousering Your Weasel! You can order signed copies, or you can just amuse yourself by my ongoing attempts at web-wrangling without a clue. Hit the nifty Buy Here button in the sidebar to your left to find the page, or just click here. Also, if you've got anything to say about my book, please, go ahead and leave a comment. I can't slap you from here.

Now that twenty children in Connecticut have died for our freedom, a lot of folks have put their heads together for solutions. Certainly our sacred liberty requires us to have to live with the sacrifice of a certain number of innocents, but there is much we can do to keep the carnage within tolerable limits.

Everybody can play a part: kindergarten teachers by keeping a loaded gun in their desks, children by locating a matched set of parents, homosexuals by dying off quietly. We all need to work together on this. First, we need more guns. A simple adjustment to the teachers’ certification requirements to include sharpshooting skills is paramount. The cost of this extra training could be offset by eliminating the promotion of the homosexual agenda, which would have the added benefit of cutting down on hurricanes.

Next, we need to introduce good security equipment. Already manufacturers are providing armored inserts for children’s backpacks, so that they can be used as shields if the need arises. The line must be expanded to include Kevlar juice boxes, which children can be trained to place over their hearts, and tear-gas crayons, one per box.

And that safe, nurturing environment provided by the legions of smiling, female teachers? Gone. Theirs is a false security that does our children no favors. It is vital to masculinize the school system, which is currently far too passive and feminine. Male teachers must be attracted to the profession in order to provide a certain baleful muscularity. Sure, we’ll probably have to pay more for the really butch ones, but who is going to think to attack a fortified grade school with male teachers and no homosexual agenda? No one who isn’t suicidal. So far they all have been, but there’s a good chance some atheist sniper out there is just out for a good time and hasn’t been taught right from wrong.

Finally, if the kids themselves were armed, and properly trained—that cannot be emphasized enough—it would only make them safer. In fact, ideally, one child in every class can be rigged up with explosives, based on the results of standardized testing. It might improve scores, too.

Well, any one proposal might have minimal effect, but taken together, we’re on the right track here. I tend to worry that these measures might make children fearful, but that’s because when I was their age I was afraid of German Shepherds and the flying monkeys in The Wizard Of Oz. Today’s children are much more advanced, and have had the opportunity to be habituated to terror much sooner. We had only that blanket injunction against running with scissors and accepting candy from strangers, and that seemed to cover the available frights. We were backward that way.

Mrs. Erdman

So I reviewed my own grade school experience to evaluate the new paradigm. Mrs. Erdman, my third grade teacher, might have done all right. She was old and a little bent over, but she had a steady hand for sure, based on her ability to demonstrate the Palmer Method of handwriting on the blackboard. But it was Mrs. Rejuney in fourth grade who could see out the back of her head. “Young man,” she would have said, without turning away from the blackboard, “put that AR-15 rifle down this instant and go sit in the corner. I’ll deal with you in a moment.”

We did have one male teacher, Mr. Baker, who looked sort of stern a lot of the time and did, in fact, scare me a little. I was glad I wasn’t in his class. If anyone had thought about bringing assault weapons to his classroom, they might have been advised that they had another think coming, and no mistake. The only time I had any dealings with him was the day John Kennedy was shot. I was in sixth grade. All of a sudden we were all hustled out of our classrooms and into Mr. Baker’s classroom, where the only TV in the wing was being rolled in on a cart. We stood and listened to the news, and when Walter Cronkite took his glasses off and said our president was dead, I looked at Mr. Baker, and his lower jaw just dropped. Just left the rest of his face, as though everything that had ever held him together had come apart.

Not long after, I saw violence for the first time in my life: two boys swinging at each other at the school bus stop. It scared me woozy. If only I’d been exposed to more violence, I would have been less afraid.

Although, less violence would have had the same effect.

An Open Bag Of Internet

If there's an open bag of potato chips in the house, I'm going to hoover them up, and I'm the same way with the internet. You open a bag of internet and I'm going in head-first, and I'll still be up at one in the morning dabbing at the little salty bits on the bottom. So if I want to air out my brainwaves, I try to go places it can't reach, like our backwards little cabin. Or I go for a walk without taking any of the fun-size internet snack devices. If I don't respond right away to your comments, it's probably because I'm deliberately off the grid.

But not always. Sometimes I'm just dealing with random computer obstrepery. The other day I'm flying along tacking up comments in this space when for no reason whatsoever I click on the "reply" button and nothing happens. I have a plan, because I wasn't just born yesterday. If I had been born yesterday, I'd probably have a better plan. I click harder. I really do. I center the cursor, I press down with due deliberation, I wait an extra beat, then I let up. I do this because every now and then the computer, which is having gastric distress, happens to relieve itself at the very moment I am pressing on the button. So I have convinced myself I fixed it. Because that's how cause-and-effect works. It works however you want it to. If it didn't, there wouldn't be so many people using the phrase "job-killing taxes."

But most of the time clicking harder doesn't work. And if I decide to ignore its little snit, and play somewhere else on the internet, I soon discover that the whole thing is acting up. It is acting like the sullen teenager you have given a simple task to, balking and scuffling its feet. Sometimes you can even see its impudent little eyes rolling. That's when you give it a time-out. That's what the techies usually tell me to do when I call them--pull the plug.

What a quaint expression! It harkens back to the days when things had A Plug, and you could Pull It. What I have in the nether regions of my desk looks like it should come with meatballs and a nice Chianti. I hover over the assemblage with the trepidation of the new guy on the bomb squad. I have a black cord, a white cord, a green cord, and a yellow cord, and several boxes they are servicing. One of them is a modem, I don't know which one, and one of them is, I believe, the Flux Capacitor, function unknown. I select the black cord and pull it out of the two boxes. The chip clip is now back on the bag and it's on a high shelf in the cupboard.

Now it's time to get something useful done.

Well, that's the trouble with kids. You'd think the moody little bastards would be real easy to ignore, once you've sent them to their room, but after a while you start thinking about how great they could be if only they applied themselves, and you let them back out.

The adolescent computer is better than my new printer, which is more like an alcoholic husband. When it's working, it's fast as hell. Spits out a page like it's throwing a beer can across the room. Other times you ask nicely and it starts to work and then shuts right down in the middle of it, and that's supposed to be your fault. Next day it's sweet as pie. Classic abusive behavior, designed to keep you off balance. But I'm no dewy-eyed bride. I am going to fix that thing, as soon as I locate a hatchet.

This stuff used to get to me more than it does now. Dealing with computer moodiness in the early days used to aggravate me no end, because it made me feel so stupid. My friend Walter used to talk me down, using an observation I never heard anyone else make. "These machines haven't been around very long," he said. "They're just not that good yet."

Pointing out another classic cause-and-effect fallacy, he told me: "just because you have trouble with them doesn't mean you're stupid." And that is true.

Of course, it doesn't rule it out.